REVIEW: OK Go- And the Adjacent Possible

By default, the future wins.

45:46 // April 11, 2025 // Paracadute

OK Go are a band more famous for their music videos than their music. The reason why is thuddingly obvious, in regards to the sheer attention-grabbingness of the videos— most any band would be renowned for stunts as elaborate as theirs. It’s also a bit of an open question, though, in regards to how little those videos’ success has done for the band’s reputation as an actual band. The leading theory goes something like this: they’re just a bit generic-sounding. Competent but unexceptional. Like most leading theories, there’s almost certainly a grain of truth there, but too many generic artists far surpass OK Go’s numbers without any visual gimmicks for that to feel like a very complete answer, especially for a long-time fan of the band like myself. Their songs regularly perform four times better on YouTube than Spotify, to the tune of hundreds of millions of plays- there has to be something more specific about the music that puts people off, even if only by a bit, right?

This I can admit, even as a fan: Damian Joseph Kulash, Jr.’s singing voice is an awkward, gangly thing. You can tell he comes from the Black Francis school of feeling out about where in his range a given note either is or isn’t, and then SHOUTING his way there regardless. He strains to convey emotion. Unlike Black Francis, he has a prim, precise diction, a very big vocabulary, vibes that read more “STEMlord” than “rockstar”. OK Go is a pop band, in the broad sense, but Kulash's musical roots are actually in hardcore punk, raised in D.C. in the late 80s when Dischord Records’ local influence on youth culture was arguably reaching its zenith. He namedrops Shudder to Think in interviews and claims that Ian MacKaye personally loaned him money to start a record label when he was in high school. Like a lot of teen punks in the 80s, his parents were also well-off enough for him to fuck off yearly to the artsy-fartsy summer camps where he met future bandmate Tim Norwind, and to a fancy private university after he graduated; he studied art semiotics at Brown from ‘93 to ‘97.

Kulash and Norwind relocated to Chicago to form OK Go in 1998, and quickly generated a fair bit of buzz through aggressive networking and self-promotion. When the major labels came calling, they told the band to “pick a sound”, and pick a sound they did, heavy on bright, chunky power chords, fizzy new wave keyboards, and stomp-clap shoutalong hooks, very in step with the polished strain of garage rock revivalism that was just coming in vogue at the time. Local hipsters quickly sniffed out the yuppie stink on Kulash, and they were not impressed. Listening back to OK Go’s early work twenty years on, it’s pretty easy to hear what Pitchfork heard: just another self-involved pretty boy with nothing to say and an excess of ten-dollar words to say it with. Look at this asshole, fresh out of an Ivy League school, paying his band’s way with his cushy day job photoshopping ads, sporting that repulsively over-tousled Mick Jagger shag, tossing off all those glib lyrics about callow women. Guess daddy’s money can’t buy inspiration, kid.

Something very, very interesting happened to Damian Kulash Jr. right as the indie set was giving up on him for good, though: he went viral.

Looking at the peak chart positions, or even the YouTube views, doesn’t really convey the sheer depth of impact that the “Here It Goes Again” video made on pop culture. Hundreds of thousands of people found out YouTube existed because it was where everyone was watching “Here It Goes Again”. It was technically a hit, Top 40 even, but more importantly it was a meme, one of the first to spread via video. A hit sells itself with a little luck, but memes do you one better: they don't even really need to sell in order to spread. In a recent interview, Kulash talks about hitting 300,000 views- the same number as their total album sales at the time— saying “every one of these is a nerd in an IT department somewhere. But they’re our people!” As it turned out, though, 2006 was about the last year that IT nerds could truly lay claim to the status of default netizen. The actual audience OK Go found online was, well, everyone, from boomers setting up brand-new Facebook profiles to the very first of the iPad babies. In that same interview, Kulash describes the band happily leaning into their newfound status as a novelty of the digital age, abandoning without compunction a club circuit rat-race that they had never particularly excelled in. After all, what artist wouldn't want an audience of everyone?

Their next album, 2010’s Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, told a decidedly thornier story— namely, the story of e-fame utterly destroying Damian Kulash's marriage. It starts with a tuneless digital WHEEZE, ends with Kulash trading places with his own reflection, and crams the intervening fifty minutes to the gills with crunchy, datamoshed distortion, Prince-on-Adderall grooves, and pseudo-scientific flights of fancy. It will always be the sound of the 2010s to me— the entire decade, the good the bad and the ugly, from the giddy, world-at-your-fingertips sugar rush of Nyan Cat all the way through to the tweet I saw in late 2019 noting that the world was statistically overdue for a viral pandemic. Flashy, expensive music videos were produced for eight of the album’s thirteen tracks- after all, OK Go's new job was for YouTube. By the time the band released their aptly-titled fourth LP Hungry Ghosts in 2014, they felt less like recording artists and more like content creators. Corporate sponsors had started popping up in their videos as their relationship with Capitol Records crumbled, and a new album cycle found the frightening existential questions raised by the second half of Blue Colour all but forgotten. Hungry Ghosts is not the sound of an entire decade. It is the sound of Google taking all the shading and serifs out of their logo, of “fun” and “play” becoming just two more things you do to earn money for someone else. I can’t even really call it a “bad” album, per se, it’s just… content.

If Blue Colour was OK Go grappling with their unexpected career as YouTubers, and Hungry Ghosts was them settling into said career a bit too comfortably, the band's new album And the Adjacent Possible finds them wizened veterans of new media, more in their bag than ever even as many of their initial misgivings about it come home to roost. Like Hungry Ghosts, much of it is coated in the oily sheen of content (but, hey, what isn't these days?). Like Blue Colour, much of it offers a bracing, patient-zero perspective on what the internet is doing– or rather, what it has already done– to our world and to our brains. Naturally, it opens with a nod to OK Go's true audience: not me, nor you, nor even some nebulous “everyone”, but the almighty algorithm.

As a practical matter, it’s pointless

To address you directly here

Any probabilistic adjustments

Will dissolve in the sea of the

Everything-everyone-everywhere-ever-has-done that you swallowed before

But let me sing with you,

daughters of the Anthropocene

Let me sing with you, scions of it all

Will you lace up your shoes

and come dancing with me?

Let me sing with you after we’re gone

That song, “Impulse Purchase”, climaxes with Kulash’s voice flickering, glitching, stretching out impossibly on one word: singularity— as though it represents a force so blinding, so powerful and corrosive, that speaking it aloud spaghettifies his very humanity into the future to be devoured by Roko’s Basilisk. Now, you may be thinking, “big whoop, Roko’s Basilisk is just a paranoid fantasy of credulous forum-dwelling tech bros”. Be that as it may, credulous forum-dwelling tech bros are actually in charge of pretty much everything right now— that’s the power of the algorithm, baby. Their paranoid fantasies are as real as the smartphone you’re probably reading this on. If you’re getting a bit of a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, that’s the feeling of getting closer to this album’s wavelength!

The album title, the Adjacent Possible, refers to tinkering around the edges of totalizing, intractable problems until a eureka moment presents itself… and at the end of the day, precious few eurekas are forthcoming. Kulash’s newfound doomer streak is expressed in its most unalloyed form with gut-twisting clarity on the frail ballad “This Is How It Ends”. The song plays out like a sequel to Blur’s “The Universal” where the satellites in every home have frozen us all in place to helplessly witness the end. Maybe it’s the end of net neutrality, maybe it’s the end of the global American empire, maybe it’s climate catastrophe, maybe it’s the literal biblical rapture or Ragnarök or Roko’s fucking Basilisk or whatever. Maybe it’s just a bad breakup or a job you really love and have to quit anyway. Maybe it’s all of it, a dozen different faces of the same dying, absurd status quo.

And it’s almost embarrassing now,

The tortured contortions it took just to believe

that there still might be,

in my Byzantine rats’ nest

of causes and effects,

a path still left to take

In the dizzying tangle,

a magical code left to break,

a choice to make

But I suppose nobody

promised it would all mean anything

God, how naïve,

believing there’s a point to everything,

When this is how it ends

For as much as that song puts the perfect words to so much of what I’ve been feeling in recent years, though, saying we’re doomed is ultimately the easy part, which is why nobody actually respects doomerism, least of all the doomers themselves. Most of the Adjacent Possible finds OK Go desperately searching their ever-bubblegummy musical stylings for silver linings adequate to the clouds at hand. Their stumbles and fumbles are numerous; if you have struggled to embrace this band in the past, do not prepare to be “won over” here. Breezy post-COVID got-my-groove-back number “Once More With Feeling” takes too long to actually get a good groove back, and contains a Keystone Kops reference that I’m dead certain Kulash is entirely too proud of. “Golden Devils” is positively SMOTHERED in trumpets mixed and mastered by Dave Fridmann, and “Going Home” is HEINOUSLY Tiny Desk Concert-coded.

Lead single “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill” epitomizes both the album’s shortcomings and its valiant efforts to transcend them. The hook for the video is that it’s stitched together from 64 different takes on 64 different smartphones. It starts simple, with Kulash stepping from one phone to an adjacent one in the same shot, suddenly in a new outfit, and it culminates in a psychedelic geometry of bodies moving around a 7x6 grid of phones. The band your screen loves best, back and more screen-ful than ever— meta, right? The gaps between phones and the split-second asynchronies between the videos they play are bugs played off as features: Kulash’s face splits apart into a wobbling Brahma nightmare-creature, and grasping hands unspool from phone to phone in a horrific Cronenbergian spiderweb around him as he sings,

Oh, the inertia

Of our ravenous brand of avarice

Of our selfishness, it was just too much

To overcome, now we’re overrun

The band already hit on a similar vein of squickiness with the foot-and-crotch-centric video for “All Is Not Lost”, sadly a tad mismatched with that song’s hammer-blows of defiant optimism against the hopelessness of impending disaster. “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill”, by contrast, reveals a soul every bit as atomized as the body-chunks onscreen(s), hovering with visible uncertainty as to how perfectly they’re matching the other chunks. More’s the pity the music only gets halfway there. Despite a nicely effects-mangled guitar lead and an agreeable core sentiment of c’est la vie, it’s simply too mild-mannered and full of jaunty cowbell to truly earn that sullen note of humanity-is-too-selfish-to-save-itself. The song has worn thin with repeated listens, and the video has underperformed. It’s not hard to see why.

Second single “Love” fares better on all fronts, but similarly reflects the contradictions at the core of Adjacent Possible. The hook for the video is robot arms manipulating mirrors— “dancing” in rhythm, wielding little round vanities like uchiwa fans, perfectly angling a reflection of one band member’s head over another’s body, forming sparkling kaleidoscopes and infinite hallways. Kulash has explicitly connected this feast for the eyes to the themes of the song itself in interviews: it was inspired by the joys of fatherhood, of seeing yourself more clearly than ever reflected in another. He says, “you can take these two flat planes and hold them up to each other, and suddenly, you have infinity”. The lyric very nearly veers into hippy-dippy we’re-all-stardust cliché, but the music ultimately carries the day: Fridmann’s production lends a loopy gravity to the revving synths on the hook and to Dan Konopka’s brisk, muscular backbeat, the latter borrowing liberally from “Making Plans for Nigel”. As the song builds to a head, Kulash dons a disco ball-patterned suit and hollers, with everything he’s got:

And against such staggering odds of anything at all

That lonely poet Chance called the dance and built the hall

And with such modest hands, drew up plans and gave us all

Love, love, love, love

The line between “trite” and “tried-and-true” is a fine one indeed, and to my ears, this just manages to land on the right side. It’s as important to say now as it was in 1967: All you need is love. The only song there’s ever been. The band group-hugs, clearly ecstatic at having finally nailed all the choreography to perfection, and the screen darkens… cheerfully informing us that what we have just seen is sponsored by Ray-Ban and Meta. Yes, that Meta, the artist formerly known as Facebook, the one that sold your elderly relatives’ brains to the highest bidders and got in a bunch of trouble for election interference and basically blew up the old, good internet to replace it with the paywalled, bot-infested hellscape we've all been irradiated by for about a decade now. Love— brought to you by techno-feudalism. Uhh, if you can’t get out of it, get into it, I suppose?

Sympathetic to humanism and counterculture though he may be, Damian Joseph Kulash Jr. is still ultimately a white American Gen-Xer who makes pretty good money working in a creative field in between enjoying domestic bliss with a former vice president's daughter. He is firmly in the doomerism kiddie pool; he would not last a day on these streets. How can a guy like that be part of the solution rather than part of the problem? Well, he can remind us that we’re also all part of the problem, for one— don’t lie, you’re still on Facebook, too! The triumphant “Better Than This” invites us to let small moments of joy and peace color the periphery of our life and, implicitly, to centralize the precarity and exploitation that comfort inevitably costs. “Take Me With You” and “Fantasy Vs. Fantasy” both flawlessly capture the trust-fall of blossoming romance, doubling as meditations on the unbridgeable distance between two minds that we must ultimately make peace with as we come closer to each other (The former, not for nothing, also reaffirms Norwind and Konopka as one of the most quietly brilliant rhythm sections currently working in Western pop). These songs are all the more potent for coming from an act that has made the Faustian bargain, or at the very least weighed gold against the soul. These are nobody’s anthems of revolution, but something far rarer: art which tangibly acknowledges that it cannot heal us alone, that it may indeed be lost in the fight for a better world. The album closes, in stark contrast to “Impulse Purchase”, by addressing us, the masses of the internet, perhaps more directly and sincerely than Kulash ever has before:

God, how I wish that the sweet earnestness of a vandal’s prayer

Could offer a moment's relief

‘Cause you’re hurting worse than a person deserves

And it’s almost too much to bear

That you can’t share the burden with me

Let’s take a step back. Why care about any of this? Why care about an aging gimmick act struggling to deliver feel-good pop without papering over a dystopian political reality they themselves have contributed to? Well, to quote the band one last time, nothing ever doesn’t change, but nothing changes much. The world OK Go helped build is on its way out. In the eleven years since their last album, YouTube’s algorithm has biased much more heavily in favor of long-form content, videos you can put on at work and halfway pay attention to for half a shift without needing to reach for your phone and risk managerial reprimand. TikTok has brought about a deluge of brain-rotting short-form slop content no less at odds with OK Go’s high-effort house style. Nobody knows better than this band does how profoundly these things shape our hearts and minds. The future is here, it’s coming for all of us, and it ain’t gonna be pretty. But, such was the case in 2006 too, and for all the horror the intervening nineteen years have wrought, there was also laughter and light and sex and drugs and rock and roll, and everything else that makes the horror worth slogging through. Things will get worse, and all we can truly expect of ourselves and those dear to us is to keep trying, keep loving, keep hoping that maybe, just maybe, we can somehow open up an adjacent possible that’s a little bit brighter. Don’t give up now.

7.9/10

For fans of:

Bo Burnham- Inside
Jean Dawson- Pixel Bath
Elvis Costello- Brutal Youth
Imagine Dragons- Night Visions